writer whose death reverberates through Alexandria with a far greater force than his life. He, too, imagined writing such a quartet, though it is a project we learn of in the last novel, Clea, and one Pursewarden planned not for himself but for Darby, whose writing processes preside over the novels. In his journal entry "My Conversation with Brother Ass," Pursewarden tells Darby, who is "Brother Ass," what he must do if he is to become not a good writer, but a great one: You might try a four-card

tradition of scholarship. The topic is academic as long as researchers bear in mind that hegemony is not a fact but a construct that derives its meaning and value within a theory that argues that social arrangements are not immutable because hegemonic practices are produced in and sustained by a system that is socially constructed. To work within the theory is to presume, however, that the point of research is both to identify hegemonic practices and to articulate contradictions in the social

such as Anyon's study (1983) of the high school history textbooks used in urban working-class schools, in which she shows that very little space is given to the history of labor unions, and that very little of what is included concerns successful strikes. This and other studies like it are very good at revealing how these histories serve corporate ideology, but they also remind us that the goal of critical research is not to replace one ideology with another (that is, to replace corporate

iterated in many of the narratives: I shortly grew alarmed both at the power of my own feelings and the increasing power of the professor's feelings. Although I did not feel physically threatened—that seemed unlikely—I became afraid that he would begin to manipulate me by using the power of my own feelings and my need for him. This fear arose as I learned how he was irrationally competitive with us [graduate students]. I felt that I had lost both his respect and his important professional

multiculturalists) but to offer students what I consider the quintessential academic experience, the often exhilarating and at times even liberating experience of making a sustained analysis and critique of unexamined assumptions; it is an intellectual privilege tantamount to an academic right, founded on the willingness to lay out a candid argument in support of a position. While most students are willing, even eager, to acknowledge that "everyone has a right to their own opinion," few are